ABSTRACT
This part consists of four chapters that look at the problem of gender-based discrimination in India. Gender, like disability, cuts across caste, tribe and religion; unlike disability, however, it is a hyper-articulate index of discrimination. From the early social reform protests against the enslavement of women, to contemporary campaigns for political voice and visibility, debates about the troubling persistence of women’s low status have preoccupied legislatures and courts alike. Yet, these very spaces have reproduced the ideological parameters within which discrimination against women is located, even while they seem to hold forth on equality for women. The connections between discrimination and the loss of liberty is foregrounded starkly in women’s collective experience of sexual assault. It is here, too, that the self-contradictory moves in the fields of law are most evident. We know now that gender is not a binary category. Although historically ousted from debate and overt articulation, sexual minorities have a history of presence, self-expression and aesthetics on the Indian subcontinent. They have possessed voice and visibility, interrupted, no doubt, but present. If sexual assault is the form that the loss of liberty takes for women, what are the ways in which discrimination intersects with unfreedom when we step out of the confines of binary classifications? And how does the law as a classificatory tool trapped in this binary deal with such unconfineability?
